It’s that time of year to spread some cheer and strengthen our connections. We are all connected on this little planet and our latest projects hopes to prove this. ioBridge introduces CheerLights – a social network of lights that stay in sync with the rest of the lights linked to a messages from social networks. It’s kind of like following a trending topic on Twitter but with physical objects.

To join the CheerLights project all you have to is build a controller that subscribes to the “cheerlights” keyword, receives the latest color command, and sets the color on your lights. So, when you see the color change know that the color it is now changing all across the world. Instructions on how to build your own physical controller are based around GE G-35 Color Effects Lights and the ioBridge IO-204, ConnectPort X2, or Arduino Ethernet.

The last color processed by CheerLights is accessed through the CheerLights Channel hosted on ThingSpeak. With that data you could this a lot further and build all sorts of applications that read in that color value and do something with it. Your application could be an Android widget that shows the latest color, a set of Christmas lights, ambient orb, or dynamically setting the background color of a website.

ioBridge has been working on a way to distribute a command from a social network and distribute to thousands of end points in real-time – a many to many issue. The technology behind CheerLights paves the way for an alert system that could cascade across the globe.

First I’d like to give a thank you to all the attendees of ioBridge’s DCWEEK Internet of Things Workshop. It was a great turnout even though it was one of the last events of a long week.

We accomplished all of our goals:

Explain to people what the “Internet of Things” is

Have everyone realize where it is in their everyday lives

Understand just how BIG it is going to be

Get people to experiment first hand with IoT

Get involved with the Washington, DC tech scene and contribute to DCWEEK 2011

Get people giddy like school children when they are controlling their own “Things” on the Internet!

All the attendees were very involved in the presentation. It was great to see the wheels start to turn as they learned about basic digital and analog inputs/outputs. Once they understood those concepts they started to see how seemingly complex devices like a touch screen could be broken down in to it’s basic inputs and outputs.

The hands on part of the workshop was very rewarding and we thought everyone had a lot of fun. We brought ioBridge Dev Kits that include IO-204 and multiple buzzers, temperature sensors, buttons, servo motors and LCD screens for the attendees to play with. Four separate groups got to go through the module setup process and begin interacting with their items through the Internet. Once they got that down, it started to get a little creative.

One group used a combination of the temperature sensor and the buzzer to have a buzzer go off when a certain temperature was reached. They monitored all the inputs and outputs right from the Internet. Another group took it a step further and had their IO-204 tweet once a certain temperature was reached. Once they got that down, they used a simple button to trigger a tweet. Sort of like a motion detector tweeting when someone came into a room.

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Hans Scharler co-founder of ioBridge was a guest on The Peggy Smedley Show. The shows was broadcast live on wsRADIO and now available as an MP3 download, so everyone can hear the interview and the rest of the radio show. Hans thanks the amazing ioBridge customers that have invested in us since the beginning and allowed us to create our own vision, our vision of a connected world.

Where do you get the latest news for M2M applications and connected devices? The Peggy Smedley Show from Connected World Magazine is where we get ours. We are honored to announce that Hans Scharler of ioBridge will be a guest on the The Peggy Smedley show on Tuesday, November 1 at 1pm EST. After the podcast airs, the episode will be available for download from The Peggy Smedley Show archives (Episode 162).

About The Peggy Smedley Show

The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of M2M and connected devices, is an informative, yet fun, talk show hosted by Peggy Smedley, president of Specialty Publishing Co. The show broadcasts live for one hour each Tuesday at 12 noon CT. The Peggy Smedley Show features discussions with top newsmakers and technology companies, as well as in-depth analysis of the week’s biggest connected devices stories and trends.

ioBridge team member, Josh, and his wife recently celebrated the birth of a baby… congrats! After a few months of settling into the sleep patterns and the whims of their bundle of joy, Josh came up with the idea to put ioBridge to work to solve a basic need for the family. They wanted to preserve breast milk in the freezer. With some research, they found that breast milk has precise temperature requirements for long-term storage.

Josh had some clear goals to ensure that the breast milk was stored properly:

Know the real-time temperature of the freezer

Send alerts if temperatures get too warm

Monitor the state of power at our home

Send alerts if power is out

In this case, adding some remote monitoring smarts to the otherwise “dumb” freezer, is the perfect solution. Josh ran a temperature probe into the freezer and connected it to a channel on the ioBridge Io-204 web gateway. On ioBridge.com, he created a data log to monitor the temperature of the freezer and set an email alert for the temperature required to store breast milk for an extended period of time. Josh also connected the Io-204 to the same power source as the freezer, so that if power was lost to the freezer it would also be lost the IO-204. ioBridge tracks whether these devices are connected, so that you can monitor their Online / Offline status. Josh cleverly connected an API call to the device to a site monitoring service and now is able to monitor the up time of his freezer just like monitoring the up time of a server.

The Internet of Things is in its infancy, but it can be very practical despite the recent articles referring to the number of devices to impress upon us just the sheer volume. To us it’s all about finding useful applications and introducing them to consumers to find our early majority product and service. We believe in and see a connected future, but we want it to be so useful that people don’t have to think about the technology. Like when you are using an iPad, are you concerned over capacitive touch technology or that it’s really easy to play games? Maybe by the time Josh’s baby grows up and enters college, the Internet of Things will be as common place and transparent as indoor plumbing.

Check out Josh’s blog for more details on setting up his breast milk monitoring system using ioBridge and a bonus project on using the Edimax Nanorouter to add Wi-Fi to the ioBridge IO-204 Monitor and Control Module.